Frigid weather, 5K's, fixed foot and credit card fraud

It has been a somewhat eventful few days. First, on Friday I got to run outside and feel as though my face might freeze off. It's nice and cold and windy, and apparently we can look forward to a high temperature of 20 degrees on Thursday. This is not supposed to happen until January, normally. And really, it doesn't HAVE to happen at all. Not sure why we're getting so lucky. Saturday was nice because there was no long ride, just a nice, short easy ride in the morning.

Oh, but then there was yesterday, Sunday. I ran a 5K. I don't particularly want to elaborate on it except to simply say that it was the slowest 5K I've ever run. I didn't check my actual time, because it might make me want to quit running all together. But I'm pretty sure that my pace was slower than what is my fastest Ironman marathon pace. Except during my marathon I'm pretty sure my heart rate never hit 193, as it did yesterday. I don't really know what the biggest problem was, I just know that it sucked.

Of course I'm coming off an injury, blah, blah. But let's keep things in perspective here. It's not like I'm coming off paralysis that had me incapacitated for months. I had a tiny crack in one little bone in my foot and didn't run for 7 little weeks. So right now I'm thinking that I will either come up with a fake name to use for running these races until I run a time that is not flat out embarrassing, or maybe think up some costume I can wear during the races so people think that I'm just running them to be funny and don't have any ideas in their heads that I might actually be trying.

Anyway, after that, I spent the car ride home coughing since I had that taste of blood thing going on in the back of my throat that sometimes happens after hard efforts in cold weather, and then I got on my bike trainer for 4 hours where I learned that while watching the movie Julie & Julia the Powerbar you might be eating is absolutely not an adequate substitute for anything you might see on screen. This was all followed by being unable to keep my eyes open to even read past 8:30, but still not being able to fall asleep or stay asleep.

The one, amazingly bright spot of the day was finding a pair of Oakley sunglasses that had been missing for an entire year, that fortunately I had still not yet replaced.

Then there was today. Today I discovered that someone has been using my credit card number in and around Sacramento, CA. This seems odd to me since I have the card in my possession and am sure that it is currently about 3000 miles from California. The first tip-off was a $14 charge at a KFC in Oakland about a week ago. Not only have I never been to Oakland, but I've also never even eaten anything from KFC let alone purchased "food" there. Then today two new ones: a gas station and a K-mart in Sacramento. Both charges around $35. So much for that credit card. But seriously, if you were going to steal like that, wouldn't you go somewhere more interesting or at least spend more money? I really don't know how this could have happened, but I'm more annoyed with the fact that now I won't have my credit card number memorized when they send me a new one. It took about a 10-minute phone call, so I'm not really so worried about that. I wonder what they made my signature look like?

Oh, and also today was the follow-up appointment with my podiatrist. The good news is that everything looks good there. And my hideously deformed hammer toes already seem to have flattened out a bit due to the orthotics he gave me six weeks ago. So my dreams of being a foot model may not yet be dead.